For this week in the arbitration report: arbitrator Gamaliel resigned from the Committee while a motion has been made about Extended Confirmed protection.
On 22 May, it was announced that Gamaliel was resigning from the committee. A statement from the committee, written by Arbitrator Opabinia regalis, says:
Gamaliel has resigned as an arbitrator because he is currently unable to edit the English Wikipedia and is therefore entirely inactive as an arbitrator. This has come about as a result of circumstances which have been disclosed to the Committee, and which in no way reflect negatively on him. We thank Gamaliel for his service on the 2016 Committee to date and wish him the best.
His resignation comes as the current arbitration case, "Gamaliel and others", is in its proposed decision phase, with the remaining members voting on the outcome. Gamaliel was elected to the committee at the December 2015 elections, where he was ranked 9th, to take up a one-year term. Gamaliel has since retired from Wikipedia altogether.
On 15 May, the committee passed motions on extended confirmed protection. Also known as the "30/500 rule", the protection level restricts editing rights for certain articles to editors who have made 500 edits and have been registered at least 30 days. Current uses of this level include the GamerGate controversy article, articles on Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian, certain articles pertaining to Indian castes and their talk pages, and any page that could be reasonably construed as being related to the Arab–Israeli conflict. The expectations for the use of 30/500 in arbitration enforcement and discretionary sanctions are:
extendedconfirmed
user group as a discretionary sanction.extendedconfirmed
user group as means of bypassing defined arbitration enforcement procedures (for example, removing the user group as a normal administrative action to avoid banning an editor from the Gamergate controversy article).
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Extended confirmed protection
Gamaliel resigns
Why is Gamaliel "currently unable to edit the English Wikipedia", and therefore unable to act as an arbitrator, "as a result of circumstances ... which in no way reflect negatively on him"? While I do not want to invade anyone's privacy, the community is entitled to some explanation of why an arbitrator that we recently elected is "currently unable" to fulfill his duties as an arbitrator.—Finell 18:34, 9 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]